Over 2,000 Italian health workers infected - <AUTHOR> http://www.ansa.it/english/news/general_news/2020/03/16/over-2000-health-workers-infected_97a0363f-e2e8-478a-be26-bc08d4d2983b.html <comment><USER2> I'm infected. As are many more than any official number out there. I infected my SO, of course. She's having a worse time than me, with a nasty cough that goes right through my soul.

We haven't bothered with getting tested since we'll probably be OK and can sit this one out from home.

I'm a healthy 34 year male without any further conditions. I couldn't find anything about the duration or livecycle of the disease so for those wondering: For me, it started as getting a regular 'flu'. A tingle down my spine, a little light headed, a little hotter. No actual fever. No coughing (for me). No sneezing. And now, day 5, my lungs are acting up. Difficulty breathing. Feeling like I've just ran up the stairs. Last night I woke up out of breath with light pain in my chest.

There are so little accounts of people describing how bad it is going to get or how long it is going to take... I wish more people would share.

I can, however still do remote development work. Besides the breathing issues, my head is clear and sitting still (and typing) is the only thing I feel like doing. Really.

[Edit] thanks everybody for your concern. These are scary times for everybody. Our country policy is "sit it out unless you have fever". I don't have a fever but can assure you I'm taking my temperature hourly and will check myself in when it hits 38°C.

<comment><USER3> Similar here (also untested because my government has a policy of not testing non-hospitalised cases, but none of the symptoms [or absence of symptoms] feels like other respiratory infections I've had before)

Symptoms somewhat similar to yours; I'm also the same age. No proper fever [some of my sleep is the slightly fitful sleep I'd associate with fighting off mild infections, but my temperature is normal or very close], I've coughed only a literal handful of times and not painfully, so clearly sufficiently mild to miss those characteristic responses, no headache and only occasional feelings of fatigue and a bit more sleep than usual. Just inflamed lungs which are more uncomfortable than painful. Back when I felt completely healthy last Wednesday and went for a 3k outdoor run (no more uncomfortable or slower than I'd have expected considering I haven't run much this year) I obviously felt like I was breathing a bit too shallowly and breathing deoxygenated air. This is basically that same feeling coming back the following day, except with a normal breathing rate [and heart rate]. I can still take a deeper breath whenever I want and I'm far from worrying I'm about to run out of oxygen, but just feels uncomfortable and I can imagine how it can cause much more serious problems for people with more severe symptoms, pre-existing lung conditions or immune system issues. It's been steady for most of this period.

I appear to be one of the lucky ones. Expect to make a full recovery, able to work from home and if the run helped accelerate symptoms showing then I'm quite glad it saved me from passing it on to other people.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing. May I ask what day you are on?

<comment><USER3> Uncertain. Four days have elapsed since I first showed symptoms, but unclear how long I had it before then since it normally has a long incubation period and I doubt I actually _caught_ it whilst running round a park in the evening on Weds which was the only time I crossed the threshold that day

Best guess is I caught it last Monday (train ride through London). Would prefer that to earlier since I was travelling back from seeing my parents and my brother's young family in a lower risk area then...

Also possible I caught it from a coworker the previous week when actually in the office: she is self isolating but exhibiting very different symptoms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The data is so strange. Malaysia has had an outbreak since well before Italy, with zero deaths so far. Vietnam and Thailand are similar. I'm beginning to suspect that sunshine/vitamin D is a good proxy for how hard-hit different regions are and the huge discrepancy. It's an awfully optimistic theory, since it suggests things will start to get better in the northern hemisphere regardless of intervention and since everyone can individually supplement with Vitamin D immediately.

Some data collected here, I welcome any additions or good counterexamples, but we won't have much more for a few weeks when we can better observe countries that are "behind" Italy, like Spain: [https://simonsarris.com/sunlight](https://simonsarris.com/sunlight)

<comment><USER5> Is Italian population deficient in vitamin D compared to those other countries you mentioned?

<comment><USER4> Did you look at the sunshine data? Bergamo has low sunshine in Feb and March comparatively.

Places hard hit:

* Wuhan: 100 (In Feb)

* Paris: 79-129 (Feb-March, North France harder it by # of cases, cannot find death info)

* Bergamo Italy: 100-150 (Feb-March average)

* Seattle WA: 100-150 (Feb-March)

* Iran sunshine varies a lot by locale. But some places like Rasht, its _very_ low light: 90, 78, 71, 113 for Jan, Feb, Mar, April

Places less hard hit:

* Bangkok 250-275 (Feb-March)

* Kuala Lumpur 185, 192, 208 (Jan Feb March)

* Ho Chi Minh City, 272 (March)

* Seoul: 175-200 (Feb-March) South Korea contained it of course, but their lethality numbers are also lower, and its the lethality that I find odd in all this.

<comment><USER6> Following this pattern we should see similar numbers all over Europe, heck significantly more in the nordic countries but that's not the case.

<comment><USER5> _heck significantly more in the nordic countries_

I think some of them instituted programs to fix vitamin D deficiency a while ago:

[https://www.nutraingredients.com/Article/2015/05/28/Sweden-t...](https://www.nutraingredients.com/Article/2015/05/28/Sweden- to-expand-mandatory-vitamin-D-fortification)

Damn, one would think in our data-crazy world stats like vitamin D deficiency by country would be one search away. But in reality, it's pretty hard to find and even harder to verify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And currently there are about 20 new infections per day in all of China. How is this even plausible? What are we doing totally wrong in Europe that China has done right? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with the numbers?

<comment><USER8> Sorry for me spamming this but this is extraordinary times:

For people who are curious what living in China feels like now (video uploaded Mar 14th), from a Japanese director living in Nanjing, China: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM)

Things are getting back to normal, with tons of precautions.

There are a few other youtube channels run by westerners vlogging on the current situation in China. e.g. [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1XG7bJnYqta_ezr12WZp7w](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1XG7bJnYqta_ezr12WZp7w)

Also, from someone lived in Wuhan: [https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/more- likely-to-get-sick-i...](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/more-likely-to- get-sick-in-dublin-than-wuhan-says-teacher-ben-kavanagh-pxsvpdt8z)

<comment><USER9> I will recommend everyone to watch the Nanjing video. That is an insane amount of precautions. Keep in mind that it is about Nanjing, which was nowhere near Wuhan numbers. Some examples:

1\. Every place is taking temperature of people. Every place

2\. You have to register your presence everywhere. Boarding the metro train you have to scan a QR

3\. Takeout is totally touchless, and contains the names of the employees involved in making it.

4\. Cabs have a plastic seal between driver and passenger sides.

5\. Restaurants have physical barriers between seats, so even if you go together with someone, you can't eat the food while looking at each other.

There are just some examples, the video shows many more.

To top it all, everyone is wearing masks. Everyone.

<comment><USER10> Just to update as this changes from day to day as things get relaxed (in Nanjing)

> 1\. Every place is taking temperature of people. Every place

Not every places anymore. Most shops, supermarkets or malls no longer have dedicated temperature staff. However entrances to living areas (neighbourhoods) and official infrastructure would have

> 2\. You have to register your presence everywhere. Boarding the metro train > you have to scan a QR

Not everywhere, like shops etc. However some cafes and restaurants required you to scan in to let you sit down. Additionally the app checked your face with your ID so you cant just share your qr code.

> Takeout is touchless

Also deliveries to your door are not back yet. Deliveries get dropped in a designated area where you go to pick them up.

> 4\. Cabs have a plastic seal between driver and passenger sides.

However their version of "Uber" has no seals and is normal.

> 5\. Restaurants have physical barriers between seats, so even if you go > together with someone, you can't eat the food while looking at each other.

No longer the case as a rule. Most restaurants are not open for seating it seems currently, but those that do you can sit next to or opposite people now. However originally it was one person per seat when they first re-opened.

Rules are being relaxed daily. In Nanjing there hasnt been a case of the virus for 2 weeks.

<comment><USER11> This may seem redundant, but can you confirm that the video from the Japanese resident of Nanjing is a fairly accurate representation of what it was like in Nanjing before the restrictions were loosened? Also, you didn't say it, but I assume you actually _live_ in Nanjing currently?

I have read countless comments online asking how can it be possible for China's case numbers to be nearly non-existent at this point and the Nanjing video paints the picture completely for me, an average American.

Another comment in this thread talks about symptoms and what it's like actually having the virus.

If a series of videos existed that showed a) what it's like having the disease (I haven't seen any videos showing that but the top comment on this thread as of now is a good first-person explanation of a "mild" case) and b) the lockdown response necessary to keep the numbers down or eliminate them altogether I feel like more people would be able to take this seriously here.

Of course I also watch that Nanjing video and realize that I don't see how it's possible that Americans would ever go for such extreme measures, which makes one think that the UK "let them get sick to get herd immunity" starts to make more sense.

<comment><USER8> Plz keep in mind that with all those measures employed in China, we don't know exactly which ones are effective and how effective they are. Also S.K. Taiwan, and Singapore has a different set of measures that seems to work. What I wanted from posting that video is to show the virus is containable once everyone is onboard.

And as a Chinese I know everyone is onboard on day 1. Tons of volunteers. Tons of volunteering health workers from day 1. The people keep temperature readings from many communities and neighbourhoods are volunteers. Many elderly volunteered to do that. Everyone is onboard to contain the virus on day 1 by themselves, not forced. Ask any Chinese you know, I guarantee you no one thinks it's just a flu. I would bet that people from S.K. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore all share the same attitude.

In startup world we say people would achieve wonders once the vision is clear and everyone is onboard. It's the same with this pandemic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sad. This number has exceeded China's.

<comment><USER13> And it's after what had happened in China.

I just hope other countries do not repeat what happens here, and be more decisive in their measures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My question is, why all the numbers look so different in Italy and South Korea? The countries are roughly the same size. They both have modern, socialized medical systems AFAIK. But the stats are completely different. We're not talking about percentages. We're talking about order of magnitude difference in everything, including relative stats.

Is this difference due to some property of population (e.g. average age, smoking rates) or the response?

<comment><USER14> I've also been thinking about this. From what I can tell, a big part of it is the most of South Korea's cases so far were skewed young and female (both demographics less likely to die). Stats for ages in SK cases here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019%E2%80%9320_coron...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_data/South_Korea_medical_cases)

Additionally, it seems SK has picked up cases much earlier in their progression than Italy (and most other countries except perhaps Singapore). This means we'll likely see more deaths as those cases resolve (and deaths/cases in SK has been increasing, was 0.6% a week ago, now 0.9%).

Another factor is it seems SK picked up a majority of their cases, mild and serious, due to extensive testing, while Italy has likely not detected many mild cases.

Finally, death rates are much higher in places where health systems are overwhelmed, such as northern Italy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does every article about a canceled event, or some new infections need to be posted?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

<comment><USER16> Historically, in practice, this guideline never applied to events that directly threaten livelihoods _and_ lives of many of us and our families.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's more than North America has tested for infected. How fucked is North America then? Italy is skinny as hell. The states suffers from an obesity epidemic.

<comment><USER18> The US has tested more than 2k people each day since March 8th. This is just wrong and misinformation at a time like this is really really dangerous. [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases- updates/test...](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases- updates/testing-in-us.html)

<comment><USER17> My bad if I wasn't clear - I meant daily. My point is America's obesity rate will just make things worse than what we are seeing in Italy.</comment></comment></comment>


The Biggest Red Flag In The Groupon IPO Isn't The Sea Of Red Ink - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-ipo-insider-selling-2011-6

<comment><USER2> Im surprised that more people aren't talking about this. If I give you $130 and say "use this to grow the business" and you pocket $120 and put $10 in to the business, that's a pretty strong sign that you don't believe in the business. That's what Groupon did.</comment>


Jwz and Brendan Eich discuss the origins of JavaScript (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-new-and-stupid/ <comment><USER2> I find it a bit odd that, despite the only numerical type in JS being floating-point, the majority of JS developers still seem to not have any better knowledge of how FP math works than those in other languages where there _are_ integer types.

</comment><comment><USER3> After seeing the shitstorm on here about the Brendan Eich issue, I was very confused. Now I remember that I have seen this before and feel the need to warn you (Americans) about what (could) be coming out of this: The GPPD- spiral.

The German-Pirate-Party-Death-spiral.

Many of you might have heared about the Pirate Party, and probably some remeber that, curiously, it was rather successful in Germany. Starting 2009, the number of party members rose (beyond 10.000) and the party started winning seats in regional parliaments. At the time, it was primarily focused on its technology/freedom agenda.

Then something weird happened. As the party tried to expand its programatic range beyond technology, many very controversial topics were voted into the program (base-income, de-criminalization of drugs, removal of the incest paragraph).

Discussions became very heated between those that wanted the party to firmly anchor itself in the "left" of the political spectrum, and those opposed to such a move.

And then they started attacking the elected representatives. Every publically visible person who had done or said something problematic in the past was publically "shitstormed". The half-life of party leaders sank down to months. This caused what is essentially the slow death of the party, since, for much of the time, there were too few people with experience at the top, too few the press could speak too.

Americans are more vulnerable to this kind of behaviour, since the separation between professional role and personal acts/views that we have in Europe is missing.

French presidents have had mistresses, left their wives, German chancellors have had three failed marriages, or a childless marriage. We had an openly gay foreign minister and ministers who refused to say "god" in their swearing in ceremony.

Top American politicians are always married with children church-going Christians, because the populace will not support "personal weaknesses".

No separation between person and office.

The internet is the ultimate shitstorm-accelerator. If there is no barrier between the private life and the professional life of highly-exposed figures, they will fall like flies.

I'm personally an ardent supporter of gay rights issues, but must say that in this case, the collateral damage could well be as bad as in the first cases in the German Pirate Party.

Now all the Mozilla employees who want to rise through the ranks must have personal views that conform to public opinion in the USA. I'm strictly anti- gun, so I probably would be "shot down" at some point, were I a leading Mozilla figure.

And don't think this will stop if Eich just goes away.

Let's all hope that Linus or one of the other (unlike Eich) really important community leaders doesn't have controversial views.

<comment><USER4> It annoys me to no end that people try to take the high ground of reasonableness by equating normal or even controversial personal political, social or religious views with the extremist hate-mongering of racists, antisemites and homophobes.

Eich's active support for the notion the gay people cannot have equal civil rights is well beyond just "controversial". OKCupid summed it up well as "those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame and frustration".

Not every "controversial" view should be treated with equal respect. Vile, hateful and vicious views warrant shitstorms.

There is a constant pattern in tech to sweep sexism, homophobia and racism under the rug as "just someones personal views".

<comment><USER5> Have you tried looking at this situation from a different viewpoint?

The responses of many of those people who are against Eich in this case can best be described as "vile, hateful and vicious", to use your words. Their calls for him to lose his job, or for Mozilla as a whole to suffer boycotts, can be described as an effort to "enforce misery, shame and frustration".

The problem here is that we have some people claiming to be against discrimination, yet they in turn have absolutely no problem engaging in such behavior toward Eich.

I think that this sort of hypocrisy really undermines their cause, and most of them don't seem to realize this.

<comment><USER6> This actually isn't that hard to understand. Discrimination is definitionally related to systematic prejudice. Their counter-reaction is neither systemic nor unwarranted (as prejudice is).

One could argue that in this era of social change we should be more tolerant of anti-gay marriage folks, bigots, etc, as this is a generational divide that will pass.

However would also could make an argument that when (a) you're a public figure as the CEO of a major nonprofit and (b) you've publicly stated and financially supported the potentially bigoted position, you will be the target of counter- attacks.

So, no I don't shed a tear for Brendan Eich. If the first thing he did as Mozilla CEO was to hold a press conference to repudiate his prior actions no that he is a public figure and commit Mozilla to gay-friendliness (not "internal memo" stuff we've been hearing), there would have been no issue. The organization is largely identified with its leadership, and this drama is playing out like a host rejecting a donor organ - this isn't just outside opinion, Mozilla employees are speaking out!

They are based in California, what did they expect?

<comment><USER7> _They are based in California, what did they expect?_

Well, Prop 8 did pass, so...

<comment><USER6> Touché :-). But I meant the larger (more liberal) enclaves like the SF South Bay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I notice OKCupid still uses JavaScript. Just sayin'.

<comment><USER9> To devil's advocate on behalf of okcupid: I don't see that there's any moral inconsistency about being happy to use something made by someone you consider problematic, while still not wanting that person to have an ongoing position of power.

Richard Wagner was an anti-semite. I see nothing contradictory about enjoying his music while also thinking that (if he was still alive) he shouldn't run an organisation of musicians which has Jewish members. (To be clear: I'm not saying I necessarily hold that position wrt Eich, just that contrary to the parent's implication, it isn't a hypocritical position to hold).

<comment> vezzy-fnord Except they're explicitly urging for Firefox to be boycotted, so they certainly have a bone to pick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mkr-hn So does this mean we'll never have supercomputers running simulations with JavaScript?

<comment><USER10> I don't see how that follows? Lots of fast systems are FP-only.

<comment> mkr-hn That was a joke. The only other on-topic comment looked lonely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Best Comment? Brendan's house and my nightclub thank us for selling out early and often.</comment>


Lightening run-time code generation - <AUTHOR> https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/05/24/lightening-run-time-code-generation <comment><USER2> Guile is a really interesting story in that they've spent ages doing some fantastic optimisations, of the kind you usually don't do when your final execution engine is just an interpreter. I used to read Andy's blog posts about compilers unaware that the pipeline didn't actually end in machine code. Hopefully that makes the template JIT they have here enough to get good performance as the input should already be in really good shape.

I wonder why Andy didn't chose to write the JIT in Guile itself, with a binding to Lightening, rather than in C. Guile is designed to be embedded and have bindings written for it.

<comment><USER3> What I love about the guile optimizer (and some lisp optimizers in general) is that you usually have a first step of source to source optimization. That means I can write some code and see what gets inined, hoisted, unrolled and removed without having to read the bytecode assembly.

That is especially nice when writing complex macros. I remember writing a loop utility and realized I couldn't run the optimizer on code where everything was known at compile time, since guile usually optimized the loop away. (for/sum ((i (in-range 5)) i) expanded into 20 lines of code, but optimized to the integer 15 :)

<comment><USER2> The tricky think about a source-to-source transformation, is where do you store the meta-data to map the new source back to the old source, for the purposes of error reporting, debugging, and deoptimisation? You can't just map from one list to another as your optimisation function.

<comment><USER3> I think it is the same system as used when doing macro expansion. Macros use syntax objects with embedded metadata.

Both chez and guile usually produces proper error sites, so it is done in some fashion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It makes me obscurely happy to see Guile evolving to remain useful, despite my misgivings about obligate-GC languages in general.

<comment><USER5> _despite my misgivings about obligate-GC languages in general_

In terms of performance, you have a point. However, there are many ways to set the performance dial, depending on your particular cost/benefit situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am building Guile 2.9.2 right now, to try it out.

When Racket (nee PLT Scheme) added JIT on x86, via GNU Lightning, there was a very noticeable practical performance bump for some of my work (dynamic Web serving).

<comment><USER3> For 2.9.1 I saw a performance improvement of between 1.5 and 4x across all workloads. It is still not as fast as racket, but iirc Andy said there are some low hanging fruit left.

The peg parser and my implementatio of clojure's transducers get the biggest performance improvements. My simple CSV parser got over 3x faster without any changes on my part.

<comment><USER7> Hi! I'm struggling to lean peg in guile - care to share csv-parsing code please?

<comment><USER3> Sure. Ill put it online whenever I have access to my computer next. Are you in #guile on freenode? Ivan ping you there when it's up.

It is slow as molasses though. A 5mb CSV file takes roughly 12s on 2.2. A properly implemented streaming parser should be several orders of magnitude faster. I want to see, just for shits and giggles if it is possible to beat pythons CSV parser with a pure guile module. I think it is. With guile 2.9 it should be a walk in the park.

<comment><USER7> Sorry for delay - will raise hand on #guile when online next

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "It's written in C and not C++" hope to stay this way. I really like guile. My problem is that I am on windows.

</comment><comment><USER9> Lightening /= lightning

<comment><USER10> The article explains that (Guile's) lightening is a fork of (GNU) lightning, so in this case, it kinda is, but isn't. Anyway, it's not a typo in the headline as might be surmissed by your comment.

<comment><USER4> Lightning does fork.</comment></comment></comment>


Government's PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says - <AUTHOR> https://news.bloomberglaw.com/white-collar-and-criminal-law/federal-circuit-affirms-limits-on-how-government-uses-pacer-fees <comment><USER2> The entire Federal Judiciary runs on a budget of about $8-$8.5 billion/year.[1] Think about that for a moment. One of the three co-equal branches of the US Government, and guardian of the US Constitution, operates on a budget of less than 1% of the Department of Defense's budget ($1.15 trillion), 10% of the Department of Homeland Security's ($91.6 billion), and 20% of the Department of Justice's ($42.3 billion).[2]

One of the reasons for PACER fees (and other court costs) is the Judiciary's attempt to have some financial autonomy from Congress, even though it clearly depends on Congress for almost all of its annual budget.

As others have stated, you can get case law for free elsewhere. You do need to access PACER for docket material, however. But there's even a fee exemption for "indigents, pro bono attorneys, academic researchers, and non-profit organizations."[3]

[1] [https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/governance- jud...](https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/governance-judicial- conference/congressional-budget-request) [2] [https://www.usaspending.gov/#/explorer/agency](https://www.usaspending.gov/#/explorer/agency) [3] [https://pacer.uscourts.gov/pricing-how-pacer-fees- work](https://pacer.uscourts.gov/pricing-how-pacer-fees-work)

<comment><USER3> > One of the three co-equal branches of the US Government, and guardian of the > US Constitution

This is incorrect on both counts. First, the branches are not co-equal by any stretch of the imagination. They are created in order of their intended level of power. The Article I branch, Congress, manifestly has far greater enumerated power than the other branches, including being the only branch with the ability to remove members of the other two branches. The dominant check on Congress's power is really Congress itself, although admittedly the other branches have some ability to curtail abuses of Congressional power. Even so, Congress can overrule both a veto and a finding that a law is unconstitutional. It can also pack the courts, and all kinds of other things. The Article II and II branches, Executive and Judicial respectively, have progressively fewer enumerated powers.

As for the second point, the Constitution explicitly gives Congress and the States the sole power to amend the Constitution, but the Judiciary has arrogated that power to itself. That's not guarding the Constitution, it's mutilating it. Likewise, Congress has ceded much of its authority to the executive.

Anyhow this is all moot because the reality is that how the US Federal Government is run has about as much to do with the Constitution as it does with Schoolhouse Rock[1]. Some of the trappings remain, but that's all. It's observably true that none of the branches is in any way a guardian of the Constitution.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFroMQlKiag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFroMQlKiag)

<comment><USER4> They are not co-equal in the sense of equivalence. Because they have different roles and responsibilities with some minor overlap.

Congress cannot make administrative law or enforce law.

The Executive cannot appropriate money.

The Judiciary cannot enforce law or make laws.

For example: courts can issue contempt orders against the Executive branch (and many have) but the Executive branch can ignore them (as many have); Congress can pass as many laws as it wants, but unless the executive branch enforces those laws they mean little; the Executive can refuse to appoint/nominate Judges and Justices, nothing Congress or the Judiciary can do about that; and so on.

<comment><USER5> > But Congress cannot make administrative law

They could, but it would be kind of pointless (that is, Congress could adopt a statute giving an executive officer a non-discretionary ministerial duty to issue administrative regulation with precisely specified content, but it's just easy to pass a statute law with the same effect. Administrative lawmaking is not an independent power.)

> or enforce law.

What are the offices of Sergeant at Arms of each the House and Senate, if they aren't law enforcement bodies directly controlled by the respective Houses of Congress?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Federal criminal defense attorneys must pay for PACER access out of their own pockets (in theory, they are reimbursed, often years later, often at less than the full cost). Nor can they access records in criminal cases in other districts.

Meanwhile, prosecutors don't pay and have nationwide access.

It's fair of course. Completely. The Rule of law™.

<comment><USER7> Hi, founder of Free Law Project here. Actually, the DOJ is the biggest PACER user and they pay a ton of money on PACER each year. Somebody FOIA'ed it a few years back, and it totals about $3-4M/year. [https://free.law/pacer- facts/#what-if-i%E2%80%99m-a-governme...](https://free.law/pacer-facts/#what- if-i%E2%80%99m-a-government-employee-say-at)

<comment><USER8> There is a difference between defense attorneys having to pay out of pocket (and being reimbursed a few years later) and the DOJ paying the bill for their prosecutors.

<comment><USER7> Yes, very true, thanks. Another interesting angle is how DOJ can subpoena tech co's for, say, location information, but defense attorneys _can 't._ So if you want exculpatory data, you have fewer avenues for getting it. The deck is stacked in a lot of ways against the defense.

<comment><USER9> What prevents defense attorney's from accessing that data? Would it be possible for a defendant to download his own location history and use it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's my pacer story: When the Microsoft antitrust case was on, I made a pacer account to follow it; and kept using it during the SCO vs linux debacle. It was a bit worrying to look at things which cost $0.10/page, but I knew that if I didn't actually go over $10 (or something), I wouldn't get charged. I never did go over the chargeable amount, but nevertheless for a few years I used to get an invoice for $0.00 - sent by airmail to the UK.

Given they never bothered to fix that bug, I guess they were raking it in.

<comment><USER11> Never fixed? I had to look some stuff up on PACER many years ago, never went over the free threshold, never got a bill of any sort.

<comment><USER10> Well, maybe they did fix it; they closed my account a while back for lack of use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If the fees were reasonable, fine. But I remember getting charged "8 cents" a page for search results, even for queries that yielded no results. The "No Results Found" page... 8 cents.

<comment><USER13> It's really interesting to see people in general confront the actual costs of computing when they're charged for asking a question. The reaction is, universally, "how dare you charge me for zero results", as though it's free to search for an answer - as if the time and money spent on performing that search must be given for free to all askers.

Most providers bury this cost in their revenue model and hide it from users. While PACER is probably charging more than is necessary, they're definitely not burying it, and I'm honestly quite happy to see that.

There is an interesting parallel in that common and widespread reaction that match issues we've seen with essential workers during the pandemic, where for example a customer will say "Why should I wear a mask? There's no one in here!", somehow failing to recognize the worker as a human being in the process.

So, to translate the PACER pricing objection into the human equivalent, I present a question:

Do human librarians deserve to be paid a wage for performing a search that finds no results, or should their wages be docked if they can't find anything?

<comment><USER14> I think the problem is user fees for a system that is supposedly funded by the entirety of society so we can ensure fair process. If you have to pay for literally nothing, it rankles. Instead, the system should just be funded by taxes like (most of) the courts themselves. Perhaps there could be user fees for extremely high usage, but $10 seems like an extremely low bar for $0.08 per page. The system as it exists appears to simply discourage the public from getting too nosy in the workings of the courts.

<comment><USER13> I think it should be more like the post office or public transit, where a nominal fee is charged (or none at all) but that fee is not the primary source of funding. Small fees are very effective at limiting the human tendency to abuse anything offered at $0. I agree that the current fees are higher than is necessary to prevent abuse - and I think it should be free to taxpayers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Recap ([https://free.law/recap/](https://free.law/recap/)) is a really cool piece of civic tech to work around PACER's absurd fees. Fantastic news that we could someday be rid of them.

<comment><USER16> Isn't RECAP piracy in some way? Granted, I don't know if these documents are protected by any copyright law, or if they're provided to users under some limited license, that would let the government sue.

<comment><USER17> No, the documents are explicitly not copyrightable.

Anyone else could setup a pacer alternative and just pay for the docs once. I think some legal services even do that.

<comment><USER18> Not true:

[https://www.trademarkandcopyrightlawblog.com/2014/07/westlaw...](https://www.trademarkandcopyrightlawblog.com/2014/07/westlawlexis/)

<comment><USER17> Okay then, copyright on them is just unenforceable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's amazing how long this has taken. I had to use PACER in the late 00s, and it wasn't just the fees that were bad, it was the whole stinking system, from billing to UI. It wouldn't surprise me if it was designed by the same contractor that built TESS for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (another fed website sorely in need of an overhaul).

<comment><USER20> There have been mitigation efforts such as RECAP [1] (and Court Listener [2]), where documents are shuffled off to the Internet Archive when you're using PACER with a browser extension installed, but this is welcome news as this data should be freely available considering the costs involved. Tremendous win for open data advocacy, but there is still work to be done.

> Thanks to our users and our data consulting projects, the RECAP Archive > contains tens of millions of PACER documents, including every free opinion > in PACER. Everything in the archive is fully searchable, including millions > of pages that were originally scanned PDFs. Everything that is in the RECAP > Archive is also regularly uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it has a > lasting home. This amounts to thousands of liberated documents daily. > Finally, we make the RECAP Archive available via an API or as bulk data for > journalists, researchers, startups, and developers.

My hope is that one day everything in PACER has been retrieved out for storage in the Internet Archive, and the ongoing costs for keeping the collection up to date are trivial. The user fee waiver per quarter has been raised to $30; please consider using RECAP if you're a PACER user!

[1] [https://free.law/recap/](https://free.law/recap/)

[2] [https://www.courtlistener.com/](https://www.courtlistener.com/)

<comment><USER21> > this data should be freely available considering the costs involved

The purpose of the fees is to cover the costs incurred by the court system in managing the document system so that it's self-funding rather than being paid out of the government's general revenue. In other words, while the costs required for publishing any particular document are miniscule, the point is to provide revenue for the court system.

I'm not defending it, but that's the reason the costs are so high and why the system still exists. To get rid of the PACER fees you need to convince Republican congressmen to "subsidize" the court system.

<comment><USER20> CourtListener expenses are less than $100k/year for providing storage and indexing of the PACER documents they have [1] (the Internet Archive also keeps a copy as mentioned in my above comment). There is room for the court's costs to decline substantially, and those cost control pressures on the judiciary's technology budget are what I'm interested in seeing. They are asking for far more than what they need from their user fees. I am not against reasonable user fees (I said "freely" above, and that's my faux pax), but very much against gouging because of politicians and bureaucrats.

For funsies, let's assume the entire PACER corpus is 10TB (edit: appears to be closer to 250-300 TB). Let's also assume that you want all of it OCRd, indexed, and available over a web interface and an API. Let's also assume a staff of ~5 technologists to oversee such a system. What do you think a reasonable annual budget would be for such a system? I would argue no more than $2-3 million. Let's Encrypt (non-profit for public certs) has a budget of $3.6 million and employees 13 people (as of 2019).

Perhaps the judiciary should just pay Free Law Project to host PACER, they've already proven they can provide a superior product cost effectively.

[1] [https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/46334...](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/463342480/08_2019_prefixes_46-46%2F463342480_201812_990EZ_2019080216542344) (Free Law Project, 2018 990-EZ, Line 17, total expenses)

<comment><USER22> Supposedly (according to the Free Law project) the size of PACER is probably closer to 250-300 TB. Your point still applies though.

[https://free.law/2016/10/10/the-cost-of-pacer-data-around- on...](https://free.law/2016/10/10/the-cost-of-pacer-data-around-one-billion- dollars/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's a travesty that we have to pay for this information at all!

<comment> site-packages1 I agree that they're public records, but you even have to pay reasonable fees for FOIA requests, which are also public records. There is some cost in maintaining and distributing the records. While it's true that the government could pay for it as a public service, and I believe they should, PACER is self-funded via these fees for now. In that regard, it's actually quite a good system, unreliant on annual budgets by Congress, but instead funded via the users at a pro rata rate for how much use a user gets out of it.

Notably, the information is free up to a certain threshold.

<comment><USER24> > You even have to pay reasonable fees for FOIA requests, which are also > public records…

Hm? FOIA requests are usually made to request the release of data which is _not_ yet available to the public. Most such requests require some level of human intervention, e.g. to determine what sorts of records need to be searched, to perform manual searches on non-digitized or poorly indexed data, and to perform any necessary redaction on the retrieved data.

PACER, by contrast, is already fully automated. The court records it searches are all already digitized, and have all been cleared for release; literally the only thing which users are paying for is the operation of the service.

<comment> site-packages1 There are plenty of FOIA requests where the responder simply has to do a quick search of digital internal records that already exist but aren't "public" in the same way that PACER records aren't "public" because they're behind a paywall. Further, it's no longer the case that "most" such requests require human intervention such as "perform[img] manual searches on non-digitized or poorly indexed data," though it is true someone needs to check for redactions. Think of the average case being like the high touch PACER option: someone takes your FOIA request, performs an internal digital search, checks to make sure results look good, and emails them to you.

I'd say in this way they're relatively analogous, though you're partially correct in pointing out some of the differences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> They raised the fee waiver to $30 in January. They say only 25% of PACER users ever exceed that threshhold.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of who makes up the 25%.

If there was a compelling public interest in serving those users in the 25% then, theoretically, the parties in each case could make their filings publicly available; the parties have access to free copies of the filings in their case.

The reasons why parties would not want to do that -- which I trust the reader can imagine -- probably explains part of the historical reluctance to make unlimited PACER use free for everyone.

As Amercians' privacy is decimated by tech companies, the moderate amount of "privacy" afforded to parties in federal courts might actually be something worth protecting.

What is filed in federal courts is perhaps one area of people's lives that is not readily available for tech companies to vacumm up on a mass scale. Needless to say, filings routinely contain sensitive personal information.

Note I am not making an argument either way, but just presenting some points to consider.

</comment><comment><USER26> for anyone who has ever gotten the surprise O($10,000) PACER monthly bill, this is a no-brainer. not just lawyers who get these bills btw.

<comment><USER27> But it also blocks access to justice. Just pulling the docket and a few related small filings for a case can cost $50+.

It (and this is a stretch) essentially disenfranchises poorer members of society by limiting their access to justice and information.

<comment><USER28> In my experience, lawyer fees are highly decoupled from their expenses... which is to say even if PACER fees were dramatically reduced, lawyer fees will not.

Not sure how that can help poorer members of society, since most people are quite unlikely to be doing their own case law research anyway.

<comment><USER29> It feels strange to have to say this, but there are thousands, if not millions, of people who have done their own legal research who are not professional lawyers. They do this because they can't afford professional lawyers and they are in legal peril. Many of them are in prison themselves.

<comment><USER4> Good thing their are many free government sources that provide all the research material anyone would ever need.

Though PACER is good for looking at submitted papers to see how other lawyers draft their complaints, motions, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The creator of CSS was sued (and ended up losing, unfairly imo but it drew the attention of the lawmakers at the end) for making an open database of court records. [https://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/06-11-blog.html](https://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/06-11-blog.html) (it has links to the next posts)

I wish that every country published their court documents for free.

</comment><comment><USER31> Just to clarify for non-lawyers, PACER is needed for certain filings, but not the four opinions themselves. There are several good websites that host these.

Not that PACER isn't overcharging, just that it isn't where lawyers go to get opinions, which are critically important for the practice of law.

<comment><USER7> I'm chiming in a lot, but this is only sort of true. In theory, yes, opinions and orders are free on PACER. In practice clerks have to check a box when they upload each opinion to mark it as free, and yeah....some clerks do a great job. Others do terribly. Some info here: [https://free.law/pacer- facts/#written-opinions-are-free-on-p...](https://free.law/pacer- facts/#written-opinions-are-free-on-pacer-but-h)

<comment><USER31> In my practice, all important opinions were published and freely available. Perhaps there are areas of law where coverage is spotty or delayed, but I literally never needed to use PACER because I didn't work on active litigation (just transactions, opinion letters, client memos and other research-related work).

<comment><USER7> Right, you can usually find opinions, but in many cases, that's because the provider you're using — WestLaw, Bloomberg, Justia, Google Scholar, whatever — paid for it on your behalf. They (we) have to go to PACER and buy these things too.

<comment><USER4> These are free

[https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/19](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/19)

[https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/uscourts/district/als...](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/uscourts/district/alsd/2017/%7B%22pageSize%22%3A%22100%22%2C%22offset%22%3A%220%22%7D)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> PACER fees are high, but at least federal records are centralized. Try searching for lawsuits at the local level. To my knowledge there is no online service at any cost that lets one hunt for civil actions. This is how the legal systems stays obfuscated for the average citizen.

</comment><comment><USER33> The fees are ridiculous. Google Scholar is free but it's very difficult to use if you just want records for a particular case. In my attempt to solve the problem, I created the website bankrupt11.com which offers free access to federal bankruptcy records.

</comment><comment><USER34> I would think that it would violate _Due Process_ if PACER or any other public court record was needed for a case, but the person needing them could not afford them...

On a related note, I would think that it would violate _Due Process_ if any piece of information relevant to any case, legal or otherwise, were available and not provided, that is, if there was some sort of barrier (monetary, legal, or otherwise) preventing its easy and complete acquisition by the public, or whoever was involved in a case and needed it...

</comment><comment><USER35> Gupta Wessler is an incredibly awesome firm. I recommend everyone interested in the intersection of technology and law to follow this firm and their motions.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't have an opinion about whether PACER's fees are too high or not, or whether metered pricing is the right plan, but our court systems are generally underfunded, severely, and _that_ problem causes far more justice equity problems than PACER fees do.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no differentiating - PACER fees _are_ a justice equity problem. It is impossible to separate one from the other. Inmates and pro se litigants need the information on PACER, too. The Courts have previously allowed these fees on the ridiculous theory that the same information was available in hard copy at the court house. It's not equal access to justice when someone can afford to get information in two clicks and someone else needs to take a bus an hour each way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> How soon before someone opens a Scihub-like pirate site for all court documents?

This feels a lot like scientific papers that are paid for by taxpayer dollars, and then yet again charged to taxpayers to access them.

<comment><USER38> RECAP.</comment></comment>


"Apple Glass" AR rumors: $499 price point, Lidar, announcement in late 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/apple-glass-ar-rumors-499-price-point-lidar-announcement-in-late-2020/ <comment><USER2> Can't imagine they'd go with that name and risk appearing like a Google Glass follow-up.

Apple always names products to sound like they live in their own universe, apart from any possible competitors.

<comment><USER3> Apple Eyes. Apple Vision. Reality by Apple.</comment></comment>


John Carmack interview on bringing Quake Live to browsers - <AUTHOR> http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2009/02/25/id-software-hopes-quake-live-lasts-at-least-a-decade/

<comment><USER2> As a 3d hacker this could be really good news. Yes plugins suck. But... Widely adopted plugins do not suck. If enough people use this new plugin it could become "the way" to do 3d on the web.

He's providing both chicken and egg in the classic plugin paradox. I fear we will wait until rapture before Adobe hooks flash the GPU. I hope it works and I hope he publishes the api.

<comment><USER3> API? As far as I know the plugin is basically a port of Quake III into the browser window. I don't know what kind of API he could publish; this isn't Flash or Java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone have any technical info on this? Is it flash? Java? Something else?

<comment><USER5> Don't think it's either.

I had an invite for the closed beta, went through all the steps to register and create an account, only to find they only supported Windows. What a waste of time.

I'm told they'll be support Mac and Linux eventually... but if your browser- based game requires yet another plugin to be installed, you've kinda missed the point imho.

<comment><USER6> _but if your browser-based game requires yet another plugin to be installed, you've kinda missed the point imho_

I guess you could think of it that way. And it's probably true for most web applications...

But then you realize it's fucking Quake III. In all its glory, in your browser, against friends, and free. Yeah I'd install a plugin.</comment></comment></comment>


New research reveals methods on how best not to worry - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-08-brood.html <comment><USER2> Not sure what new insights were brought up here.</comment>


Private police carry guns and make arrests, and their ranks are swelling - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/private-police-carry-guns-and-make-arrests-and-their-ranks-are-swelling/2015/02/28/29f6e02e-8f79-11e4-a900-9960214d4cd7_story.html <comment><USER2> The biggest question that comes to my mind when reading this: What powers do these SCOPs _actually_ have? If an SCOP tried to arrest someone and they simply said "no" or otherwise resisted, can that person be charged with resisting arrest? Do the tickets they write carry the penalty of law? If you don't pay them, can a bench warrant be issued, etc.?

There's obviously value in supplementary security in certain places -- otherwise mall cops and other private patrols wouldn't exist. But a mall cop can't arrest you, and a private security patrol can write you a ticket but it's meaningless if you decide not to pay it.

Curious if anyone knows more about this...

EDIT: Did some digging. Looks like the state gives them the power of real cops. Amazing.

[https://leg1.state.va.us/cgi- bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+19.2-13](https://leg1.state.va.us/cgi- bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+19.2-13)

"a special conservator of the peace shall have all the powers, functions, duties, responsibilities and authority of any other conservator of the peace"

<comment><USER3> _EDIT: Did some digging. Looks like the state gives them the power of real cops. Amazing._

Surely at that point they _are_ real cops?

<comment><USER4> I guess that depends on if you define a police officer by the power they wield or by the training they receive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the article: "A handful of incidents involving SCOPs in Virginia and nationally have focused attention on the training and oversight of private police."

Well, many incidents nationally have focused attention on the training and oversight of municipal police too, to put it mildly.

</comment><comment><USER6> In most US states _anybody_ can make an arrest if they reasonably believe a felony has taken place, and can even make an arrest for misdemeanors that involve "breaches of the peace".

As for carrying guns, WaPo might be interested to know there are lots of places in the US where you can carry a gun without being a cop.

<comment><USER7> > In most US states anybody can make an arrest if they reasonably believe a > felony has taken place

IIRC, that's incorrect; in most US states, the rule is that non-felonies (if lawfully subject to such arrests at all) subject to citizens arrest only if they occur in the presence of the arresting person (not if the arresting person merely reasonably believes that they have occurred), and even for felonies the arresting person must reasonably believe that the arrested party committed the felony, but the felony _must_ also have _actually occurred_ , otherwise the arresting person is liable for false arrest even with reasonable belief that the arrested party had committed a felony.

<comment><USER6> >...and even for felonies the arresting person must reasonably believe that the arrested party committed the felony, but the felony must also have actually occurred, otherwise the arresting person is liable for false arrest even with reasonable belief that the arrested party had committed a felony.

I don't believe this is true, though I suspect we're getting off into the details that vary from state to state. Certainly you're asking for trouble making a citizen's arrest unless you're pretty damn sure you know exactly what's going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> North Carolina has company police[1] that are required to go through the same state police academy training as all other officers. This seems to be one of the fairest models amongst the states for private police.

I first found out about this at the famous Biltmore Estate where they have their own company police dept. It made sense when explained that the estate is 8000+ acres and it could take 30+ mins for the nearest deputy to respond and find where they were needed. The company police are already on site and know the estate in and out.

In almost all states there are private police statues for rail roads, universities, FedEx[2], etc. Of course every government agency or authority wants it's own police force leading to things like FBI Police[3] or Georgia World Congress Center Authority Police[4].

It seems clear to me that any time you have a large private space, be it a mall, theme park, college campus, etc., there will be need for private police. What happens when there is no company police statute is that businesses hire off-duty local police, leading to things like the NYPD Paid Detail Unit[5].

It's far more worrying to me to have public police working off duty for private interests, than having private police who's jurisdiction are limited to their private property.

[1] [http://www.ncdoj.gov/getdoc/cda6467e-77ce-4f5e-bb46-502e15c7...](http://www.ncdoj.gov/getdoc/cda6467e-77ce-4f5e-bb46-502e15c78ada/2-6-3-1-1-3-Campus ---Company-Police-Officer-Certif.aspx) [2] [http://www.semissourian.com/story/132255.html](http://www.semissourian.com/story/132255.html) [3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Police](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Police) [4] [http://www.gwcc.com/about/Safety.aspx](http://www.gwcc.com/about/Safety.aspx) [5] [https://www.nycpba.org/archive/nydn/03/nydn-030810-ot.html](https://www.nycpba.org/archive/nydn/03/nydn-030810-ot.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> San Francisco has had a private police force since 1847

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Patrol_Special_P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Patrol_Special_Police)

<comment><USER10> This is a major part of the plot in the movie Kuffs. It was the first time I realized that such a thing still existed in modern times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of people are going to compare any kind of private police to "real" police, but that' just the first step in coming to realize what a police force actually is. It's not as ubiquitous and black/white as most people assume.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting fact: the third largest non-government-owned employer in the world is a security company called G4S.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers)

<comment><USER13> And they are absolutely freaking dreadful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gun_owners...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gun_ownership)

<comment><USER15> One thing that I feel must be mentioned to put that list into perspective: "guns" can mean a range of different things.

For Sweden (9:th in the list, with around 1/3rd the number of guns per capita as the US, and also where I live), I'm pretty sure a very high percentage of those guns are rifles, used for hunting.

Handguns, which _seem_ very common in the US, are very rare among people who would have their weapons registered. I guess almost all such owners are sport shooters; owning a handgun for personal self defense just doesn't exist as a use-case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh dear, private citizens carrying arms and protecting private property and life. Tut-tut!

<comment><USER13> Private citizens carrying arms to protect the rights and property of other private citizens through the mechanisms granted to them by the state. I would have thought Libertarians felt a little conflicted.</comment></comment>


Interns with toasters: how I taught people about load balancers - <AUTHOR> https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/21/lb/ <comment><USER3> This reminds me strongly of another system of distribution, which suffers from the same effect: differential gearboxes in cars.

Since the torque to all the wheels is equal, if one wheel slips it very quickly takes all of the power of the engine, since power = rotational velocity * torque. Only if the speeds are similar is the allocation of power to the wheels similar.

In cars, the solution is to make sure that the power is distributed fairly evenly even if a wheel loses traction. This used to be done with thick grease inside the differential gearbox to limit the difference in speeds - <USER2> recently complex gearboxes and traction control achieve the same thing, but through constantly monitoring the speeds of each wheel and braking wheels that are spinning out of control.

It's interesting how such disparate distribution systems seem to have such similar failure modes. I wonder if the two sides could learn something from each other here.

<comment><USER4> There are a variety of mechanical systems used to combat this problem, not just thick grease.

Limited Slip differentials can be employed to ensure that one wheel can only slip so far before the differential locks and then both wheels are forced to rotate together. LSDs can be employed in 3 positions front, rear, and center. The front and rear will lock left and right wheels together, the center one will lock the rotation speed of the front and back axles.

You can also add manually selectable locking differentials in any of those positions instead. Frequently, you see LSDs in front and back and manual lockers in the center.

In off road applications it is more common to see manually selectable lockers in every position. Because of the lack of differentials, though, manual lockers put a lot of load on the drivetrain if the surface isn't slippery.

The alternative, traction control can use variable differentials to send different power amounts to different wheels, typically by employing the brakes on the slipping wheel to force power to distribute evenly.

Obviously, there is a lot to this, but highlights some of the options.

<comment><USER5> There's also the Torsen differential [1]

[1]: [https://youtu.be/JEiSTzK-A2A](https://youtu.be/JEiSTzK-A2A)

<comment><USER6> And for those on a budget - what we in Australia call "The CIG Locker"...

[http://www.billzilla.org/diffs.htm](http://www.billzilla.org/diffs.htm)

(They _kinda_ work on rally cars and hillclimbers...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And that's why you always set health checks on servers behind a load balancer that should take bad ones out as soon as possible. You then get another interesting problem, which is if the server is only spitting errors when serving requests, it'll then be marked healthy again and forever toggle between healthy and unhealthy. But that you can also solve.

<comment><USER8> The mistake I've seen here is having the "health check" do little or nothing. In many web services, I've seen a /ping or /health api that the load balancer calls to ask "are you healthy?". But people get rushed or lazy or requirements change, and they wind up with that api just doing "return true".

Now you've got a host that can't access a database or can't do much of anything- but it can return true!

Health check APIs should always do some level of checks on dependencies and complex internal logic (maybe a few specific unit/integration tests?) to ensure things are truly healthy.

<comment><USER9> At work we have two endpoints on every service, `/status` and `/health-check`.

The former is basically a "return true" endpoint, which can tell you if the service is alive and reachable. The latter will usually do something like "select 1;" from any attached databases and only succeed if everything is OK.

<comment><USER10> And the former is the one you want your Load Balancers to be checking. With a deep health check, even a brief database outage will cause every web server to be taken out of rotation, and then you're completely down for at least as many health check intervals as it takes for the LB to consider a host healthy again. Same goes for any other shared resource that is likely to affect all web servers if it becomes unavailable.

<comment><USER11> Or you just have smarter load balancers, that realize when _all_ of their servers are acting funky and stop taking servers out of rotation.

<comment><USER12> Or to riff on this idea further: You make the concept of a node's "relative stability" part of the load-balancer logic the same way that "relative idleness" is a factor.

Then if all 100/100 nodes get taken down by some shared problem, the system simply degenerates into picking the idle-est of the 100.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At a real estate webhost in 2014, we had a small web farm behind a single load balancer. I've written some previous posts about the interesting architecture choices made by the lead architect in previous HN posts. Along with these, it was the days of "move fast and break things", so developers got admin access to servers and would develop against live sites. Fun times to keep a web farm online all night long.

Partly because it was such a small operation, we heavily instrumented the web servers with PRTG, along with hitting a number of key sites every minute, on each web server. "When XYZRealty goes down, so do all of these other sites!" "We'll put a sensor on XYZRealty."

This gave us great data about the health of the servers, including identifying bad apples, and even aiding in performance testing of new modules. We were able to catch memory leaks and processing spikes before they broke our sites. And when 64-bit modules were ready to replace the 32-bit modules, we had baseline data ready to compare and evaluate.

Not that this won't scale - quite the contrary. Though it creates some data and requires dedication to maintain.

</comment><comment><USER14> I see that on my continuous integration system. We use Teamcity with ~50 agents for build tasks that take 20-30 minutes. Each agent can only be running a single task.

During the day, all agents are busy and the queue fills up with 30 or so pending tasks.

If one agent gets into a bad state where, say, it fails to checkout from source control and fails within the first 20 seconds of a build, then it will very quickly chew through the entire queue of pending tasks, failing them all.

You'd think the more agents you have the better insulated you are from the failure of a single one, but this particular failure mode actually becomes more common the more agents you add!!!

<comment><USER15> > this particular failure mode actually becomes more common the more agents > you add

I'm surprised. I would expect the length of the pending job queue to also have an impact on this failure _mode_ (as opposed to the failure _cause_), and the queue length is inversely proportional to the number of agents, flooring to 0 when you have to many agents than necessary to deal with peak demand.

If the bad agents (I'm assuming that the fault to check out from SCM lies in the agents themselves, not in the overloaded SCM server due to too many agents polling, otherwise this is not an example relevant to the thread) are e.g. 1 every 50 agents and the number of agents is much larger than the peak load (e.g. a million agents), the probability of a job of failing approaches 1/50, because the good agents blocked on doing work are just a small fraction and thus they don't significantly skew the probability of a new job to get scheduled to a bad agent (which are more likely to be ready).

If on the other hand you have less agents than peak load, the queue will contain some jobs, and bad agents will chew through the whole queue when they get the chance, as you described.

And they always get the chance, since they are almost always ready (if they fail very quickly), so that the pool of ready agents will almost always contain only bad agents.

If you add more agents you have to deal with these bad agents "floating on the top of the pool", and the new ones you add (at the rate of e.g. 1 every 50). So, if you have 5 bad agents and you add another 5 you still have a pretty high chance that new jobs will land on the bad ones.

But you can add more and the probability of success just gets better.

<comment><USER14> That is a good point and I like the visual metaphor of bad agents "floating on top of the pool".

I was considering the fairly narrow problem domain between say 20 and 40 agents, and the queue fills up to perhaps 50 pending tasks mid-day. You are correct in the case that once you add enough agents to keep the queue empty, then additional agents reduce the fail chance.

Sadly, though, the CI system I use (Teamcity) prioritizes agents that have a history of completing that particular task the fastest. That's great if your agents are all different specs, but fails spectacularly in this case, where a bad agent will be selected above a good one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To summarize: "implement health checks to take bad servers out of the service pool, always!"

Love the very didactic way of writing. Perfect for managers, not interns!

</comment><comment><USER17> That's why I like random load balancing. If each machine is powerful enough and can handle a few thousand users then the distribution averages out.

Smart load balancers are only really necessary if you have inefficient servers that can't handle more than 100 connections per second and they're difficult to get right.

If you toss a coin 10 times, you're much more likely to get >=80% heads than if you were to toss that coin 1000 times.

<comment><USER18> That model works if you have a large number of short lived requests.

On the other hand, if you have a small number of long running requests that you want to distribute over a number of servers, then your load balancer needs to track which servers are busy, or you'll spend a lot of time waiting for the randomly assigned server to finish, while others are idle.

<comment><USER19> Then you design your system to always respond as quickly as possible. HTTP even has a status code for that: 202 Accepted. You put the job in a queue and return some ID or cookie to the client, possibly also an ETA. Client can then poll for results (with bounded exponential back-off), again polling is just a quick key look-up; alternatively, if you have some means to push results to clients (like via WebSockets), use that.

If Python is your thing, Celery makes this pattern trivial to implement.

This also simplifies so many other things: for example, deployments (and rollbacks!) can proceed much faster, since you don't need to wait obnoxiously long for all connections to drain.

Of course you're pushing more complexity up the stack, but in my experience it's a good trade-off.

<comment><USER20> I've spent enough time building systems and doing ops that this complexity genuinely scares me. Have you used this pattern in highly scalable production apps? What's it like to debug when everything goes to hell?

<comment><USER19> So first, this is not my idea, but something that people much smarter than me came up with.

This is the pattern that AppEngine enforces. Apps that regularly take more than 1s to respond are penalized, and there's a 60s hard deadline on all requests. Things like a task queue or push channels are built-in to the platform, with a high-level API exposed, so you just focus on writing the application / business logic.

Celery tries to basically do the same for you, w/o the proprietary Google SDK's.

> What's it like to debug when everything goes to hell?

From my experience so far... You will find bugs in your application code way more often than in a battle-tested task queuing system, much like you're quite unlikely to find a bug in nginx or Python.

Fixing things is MUCH easier than in a request / response model. I know it's not a "web scale" example, but imagine an installation involving camera rigs, some networked hardware, a transcoding server, etc. Dude walks into a photo booth, types in his email/phone number on a tablet, etc. When I see a failure in a component of the pipeline, I can hack together and deploy a patch in seconds / minutes (from alert to running the fix in production) and just tell the system to retry a failed job. Dude gets his silly photo via email/sms within two minutes instead of one.

Picture a similar situation in a web application that processes user-uploaded media. You write your batch processing logic to bail early on any sign of error, and when you get the chance to fix some bug that e.g. affected 3% of your users, again - you resubmit the failed jobs and users just see the result with a delay, instead of having to re-upload.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the response - I understand it much better now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not sure how relevant this is to Rachel's incident, but looks like they use ECMP/BGP->shiv(L4)->proxygen(L7). So hard to believe that health checking wasn't in the mix. If the nodes were passing the health check, but not properly serving requests still, then I'd assume that a post-mortum items would have involved improving health checks.

Found this pretty cool presentation/PDF about FB's load-balancing architecture. Stays fairly high level: [http://www.esnog.net/gore16/gore16-files/Mikel_Billion_user....](http://www.esnog.net/gore16/gore16-files/Mikel_Billion_user.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER22> Great "teaching by showing" example but I don't get the initial technical scenario; you have sophisticated (ie, not RR / random) load balancers that keep track of queues in web servers, so they have to get some information back from them (when job was completed, from HTTP response for ex), but somehow don't react to 500 errors? seems like badly configured LBs. Still scenario can be used as teaching or interview question.

<comment><USER23> I've worked on a system which communicated errors by responding with a 200 and then indicating the error in the response body!

Similarly, you might have e.g. a server which is responding to a 'get all widgets in category' call by quickly responding '200 OK, no widgets found', and thus ends up sucking up all the traffic.

<comment><USER24> Exactly, you need to have a health check that actually exercises all the layers of the system and returns real data.

You don't want to use actual data, so you add a dummy account.

Someone deletes the dummy account all the servers that are working perfectly start reporting they are sick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Maybe some people dismissed her problem as 'impossible' because she didn't inform what kind of load balancing technique was the load balancer using?

      I suspect what happened is that they didn't understand the problem, and so resorted to ineffective means to steer
      the attention away from their own inadequacies.

^ This statement is kinda harsh.

<comment><USER26> Every post on that blog is about how the author is incredibly clever and surrounded by dolts.

<comment><USER27> Many of her posts are about teaching or communicating issues like this to others. In other words, there is no reason to give a class like this if she doesn't actually know more than the interns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > "some of the commenters dismissed either it ("impossible") or me ("doesn't > know anything about load balancing"). "

This to me is odd. Was this posted when AWS's ELBs were new and shiny?

Most of the big failure cases I've dealt with are along these lines.

One server does something stupid and gobbles up the world.

That being said, this is a very neat way of describing the problem, I shall be referencing this in the future, I might start putting that in an interview question....

<comment><USER29> Given the author's presumed gender, I understood it to be thinly-veiled sexism. But I could be wrong.

<comment><USER28> Perhaps, or just typical dickishness. (mind you its the same thing really.)

As a devop I get told or sorts of "facts" about various building blocks.

We are currently looking at low latency API (read not using HTTP) half of the suggestions I got back were about using haskell or Go. No one bothered with the low hanging fruit, like re-using TCP sockets, using predefined schemas instead of json, etc etc.

Not one person thought about LB latency...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> >and so on down the line until everyone had bread. At various points, a toaster would finish and would pop up. ... I'd notice that they were done and would run over to give them more toast.

You'd give them more bread, not toast. Toast is already processed bread :).

<comment><USER31> Ah! Correct you are. Fixed. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> A great story, but I'm distracted by the word _caromed._ How did I not know about that word? Now I feel the need to inject it into my active lexicon.

</comment><comment><USER33> A protocol without considering the possibility of insane counterpart is doomed to DDoS the systems that utilize it.

</comment><comment><USER34> If possible can you share the link to your lectures? (:

</comment><comment><USER35> Who is Rachel and how do her short and simple stories always hit the front- page?

They're interesting but I always think they're a little _too_ simple. I mean this entire thing can be summed up with:

 _500s (and other errors) are returned faster than processed requests. Load- balancers will find a misbehaving server 's queue empty more often and give it all the requests_

<comment><USER18> Everything seems trivial once you understand it. The author seems to be good at making people understand, so that it seems trivial afterwards.

Knowing nothing about load balancers, had I read your summary before Rachels article, I would probably just glossed over it, but I would not have understood its profound importance for designing load balancers.

Rachel's story kept me engaged and explained the problem in a way that I will surely remember a lot longer.

Teaching is not about reciting facts -- that's what reference manuals are for. Teaching is for engaging students, making them interested, giving background on a topic, telling you why something matters, making it easy to understand, and making sure the student remembers the most important bits.

It's something I have been struggling a lot with junior devs and interns. I show them what they are doing wrong, how to do it correctly, and the next day they make the same mistake again. If people were perfect logical machines, just telling them facts might be sufficient. Unfortunately people are people, and it's really really hard to teach them something effectively.

<comment><USER36> I think the truth lies in the middle somewhere. I knew absolutely nothing about load balancing before reading OPs comment and the blog post, and while you're correct that I wouldn't have retained OPs bullet point version as well as Rachel's, Rachel really went on at a length far beyond what was needed to tell the story / explain the concept (eg, the beach ball sized bag of bread).

People need an intuitive concept and image to grasp and reason on while they master an idea, but that doesn't justify any arbitrary amount of over- elaborating.

<comment><USER37> I found that the (over)-elaboration made the article funnier to read. Since it's a Sunday, I wouldn't have read it if it was a boring, efficient, fact- crammed text reading like something from one of the more boring computer science classes I take. I did finish this though, and learned something on the way.

So my point is: There are times when efficient and to the point is called for, and there are times when it's not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> >When it landed on certain web sites, some of the commenters dismissed either it ("impossible") or me ("doesn't know anything about load balancing").

Does anyone have a link to what she is talking about?

</comment><comment><USER39> > This is what happened when one bad web server decided it was going to fail > all of its requests, and would do so while incurring the absolute minimum > amount of load on itself.

Good ELI5 explanation, but it doesn't really explain why the webserver failed the requests as it did. Or maybe I'm missing something?

<comment><USER40> > it doesn't really explain why the webserver failed the requests as it did. > Or maybe I'm missing something?

That the article is about load-balancers and how a single "rogue actor" can have outsized effect on the entire thing. The failing webserver is besides the point.

<comment><USER39> Oh, ok

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't really see how this is an issue engineers need to be particularly wary of?

Firstly, your typical load balancer doesn't work this way anyway. It will just keep feeding requests to the application hosts on a round robin or random basis. Most don't keep track of how busy each instance is.

Secondly, any decent (HTTP/layer 7) load balancer will notice if an instance is returning exclusively 5xx errors and will stop routing requests to it. Would fail even the most basic of health checks.

<comment><USER42> AWS ELBs work this way. They offer more requests to clients with the shortest backlog

<comment><USER41> Do you have a link to any documentation mentioning this?

As far as I'm aware - using ELBs heavily day to day - it doesn't maintain a backlog and simply distributes requests on a round robin basis the moment they come in. There is no queue of waiting requests I don't believe. If the request can't be fulfilled immediately, it is rejected.

<comment><USER43> From the AWS docs:

> With Classic Load Balancers, the load balancer node that receives the > request selects a registered instance using the round robin routing > algorithm for TCP listeners and the least outstanding requests routing > algorithm for HTTP and HTTPS listeners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Based on how verbose this article is I think maybe her original article was misunderstood because it was a chore to sort out the junk from the content just like this one.

Too much flourishing, poor pacing

<comment><USER37> Just the right amount of flourishing for a lazy Sunday :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I feel like if you have to teach them about load balancers as college interns, FB needs to find a better school to pull interns from.

<comment><USER46> What kind of college teaches about load balancers?

<comment><USER41> If they're not teaching about the most basic principles of building scalable systems, what is the point of doing a degree, or hiring people who have done a degree?

<comment><USER47> Several of the top CS programs specifically do not teach details like configuring a load balancer as with a proper background in computer science it is assumed that you can figure out the latest programming languages and the install instructions for popular software packages. It would thus be a waste of a very expensive degree as you could learn about configuring LAMP and a load balancer at a trade school instead of a theoretical research university.

No one hires MIT grads because they graduate with more extensive load balancer knowledge.

<comment><USER48> That is what you get the technicians to do</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


P Is for Phosphorus - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=581149776 <comment><USER2> Phosphorus is one of the things you learn a lot about when in renal failure. Its something that the kidneys regulate in your body. And dialysis is not so good in removing it. Also it turns out most natural protein sources have phosphorus so it can build up in you. But the worst kind is the added phosphorus preservatives which takes the body no effort to absorb. And at this time, there is no requirements to disclose the amount on a nutritional label. SO a lot of it is guesswork.

Typically high phosphorus is treated using binder which are medicines that absorb the phosphorus before your body does. Most of them have ancillary side effects though the recent varieties are getting much better.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's worth mentioning in this context the sad, strange story of Nauru:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru)

A tiny Pacific island, formerly covered in rainforest, now mostly desert after having been mined for phosphate. Without plant cover, its groundwater is going brackish. Also, Australia detains migrants there. Or rather, a private company detains migrants there on behalf of the Australian government.

<comment> King-Aaron > Or rather, a private company detains migrants there on behalf of the > Australian government.

This is a can of worms which anyone who has an interest in human rights should open and look into. What our government is doing to refugees on Nauru is criminal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Phosphorus retrieval - relocating it from relatively poor land that is acceptable for low-density infrequent grazing, but unsuitable for intensive agriculture - and returning it to the more intensely farmed areas of a human habitation, is one of the key benefits Simon Fairlie describes in his book[1] for the keeping of large grazing animals (even if they're not primarily kept for meat consumption).

I have a very small sample set, but I've yet to meet a vegan that's aware of the phosphorus cycle problem. The only alternative to grazing / foraging animals (and as per TFA I'm happy to include humans in that category) is to employ large amounts of infrastructure and energy, and it's not even clear how long that would work.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9251480-meat](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9251480-meat)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't find a picture of the mentioned Moroccan conveyer belt on NPR's site, but Atlas Obscura has a few pics:

[https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-world-s-longest- conv...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-world-s-longest-conveyor- belt-system-bu-craa-morocco)

<comment><USER5> Google image search brings up tons. I expected it to be a semi-enclosed structure (think log flume), but it turns out it's really just an absurdly long flat conveyor belt, carrying dust and soil more than the "ore" I'd imagined (although some photos show more defined rocks and ore).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Peak phosphate is front of mind for a lot of commodity traders, but most end users (farmers) are unaware or apathetic - at least in New Zealand where I grew up. Most farmers will put an annual quota of Nitrogen, Phosphate, and Potassium (NPK) on their farms as advised by either of the two major fertiliser suppliers. Every 5 years or so these companies revise how much Phosphate should be applied, increasing it each time as the efficacy of the phosphate application lessens.

Soil is incredibly complex. Much like the human body, it has a lot of different chemical and biological interactions. For example phosphate is often applied with Lime (calcium carbonate), which adjusts the pH of the soil. The soil pH has to be roughly between 6 & 7 for it to be available for uptake by plants/roots (once again accounting for hundreds of other factors). If the soil has pH>7 the phosphate will be "fixed" by the excess calcium. If it has a pH<6 then its "fixed" by excess aluminium/iron. Or there is no fixation at all and the phosphate just leaches into waterways before it can be utilised by the plant. This is a overly simplified mechanism which has been used for a long time in agriculture.

A more effective action than trying to find new sources of phosphate is to change how we use the phosphate. Applying the phosphate with carbon and organic matter is probably a good start. Carbon is good for binding nutrients and organic matter is a biological playground for worms and fungi. Mycorrhizae are soil fungi that form a symbiotic association with plant roots. The hyphae (branch) of the fungus connect with plant roots and extend into the soil, acting like extensions of the plants root system by absorbing nutrients and transporting them back to the plant roots. A major benefit in this respect is an increase in P uptake. In exchange, the mycorrhizae receive sugars manufactured by the plant (through photosynthesis or other nutrient uptake).

Unfortunately there hasn't been much commercialisation of any of new science/innovation in the fertiliser industry, for reasons I'm not too sure (disclaimer - my family produce fertiliser so I might be biased/jaded by the industry). Probably because we still aren't close enough to peak phosphate. It may also be because the soil conditions have to change before they become conducive to biology and organic matter, which would mean a "down year" for a farmer. There are also a lot of snake-oil salesman peddling the latest magic water that a farmer can spray on their crops for immediate results.

We need to start looking after our soil much like we look after our bodies. Living on a diet of NPK is just as bad for soil as a human living on burgers, coke, and fries.</comment>


Optimizing trie-based spelling correction algorithms at Constructor.io - <AUTHOR> http://blog.constructor.io/2017/07/12/optimizing-trie-based-spelling-correction-algorithms-at-constructor-io/ <comment><USER2> I'm curious, how do you guys estimate "fitness" of the search results you found, i.e. whether it was what user searched for or not.

Just looking whether user later clicked on a result, or continued to search?

<comment><USER3> That's definitely one signal, but it can be refined by tracking whether the search led to click-throughs, conversions, a different search, a bounce, etc... The conversion is the most important event, but there are a lot of important features aside from that which we'll use to improve results over time. If you're interested, our behavioral api ([https://constructor.io/docs/#behavioral- data](https://constructor.io/docs/#behavioral-data)) goes through some of this as well. We've done a lot of work to figure out which signals are the most important, and are continuing to develop this feature all the time as we acquire more data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this mean all prefixes have to be regenerated for every addition of a new item? Or can you invalidate the relevant prefixes?

<comment><USER3> This was a problem with the very first working implementation! However, with some intermediate data structures we were able to take advantage of the fact that, for an index with millions of items, adding or deleting a few thousand probably does not change the set of prefixes or their relative rankings very much. So although the initial precomputation of the prefix mappings from scratch takes ~10 minutes for our largest customers, we were able to get subsequent index updates down to mere seconds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice post. How do you customize the Damerau-Levenshtein algorithm? Did you write a new from scratch?

<comment><USER3> Hi, and thanks! Well, there's no need to re-invent the wheel, and there already exist fast implementations of DL distance. However, Damerau- Levenshtein distance is just one piece of our string comparison evaluation system that is built in-house and is constantly under development and improvement.

For example, another important aspect of the comparison metrics is our in- house phonetics library that we've built to be sensitive to vowel context, syllabification, diphthongs, stemming and lemmatization, and other language phenomena, and we are fleshing it out to handle other languages including some Eastern European and CJK.

</comment></comment><comment> ak-409 Cool) sounds as interesting approach. It is good to compare it in real life.</comment>


Calling All Engineers (Twilio is Hiring) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twilio.com/2010/08/-calling-all-engineers-.html <comment><USER2> I've been on Hacker News much longer than I've worked at Twilio so set aside my bias for the moment and hear this from a fellow community member: Twilio is an awesome place to work. Our engineers work on interesting problems building really useful products and services (you should see what we have in store for the future). We _genuinely_ care about helping our customers be more awesome.

Personally I've never worked at a place where my input has been so highly valued and I'm not particularly high on the totem pole (and I work remotely to boot). It doesn't matter. Everyone has something to contribute and everyone's contributions are equally valued. I've learned an immeasurable amount in just a few months from the ridiculously smart people I get to work with. This is the smartest, most committed crew of people I've had the pleasure of working with. They're fun people too.

Maybe working for someone else isn't your thing, but if your circumstances require you to do so, there are few better places to work.

If anyone has any questions about what it's like working at Twilio, feel free to contact me directly at email@example.com or ask your questions here and I'll answer what I can.

<comment><AUTHOR> As your boss, I just want to say that you made my day. Ask him anything (just not how much coffee I drink)

<comment><USER3> How much coffee do you drink?

<comment><AUTHOR> hey, you back from vacation?! My answer: to f*ing much

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They're not calling "all engineers" their calling all _software_ engineers/devs/programmers/etc. I suspect that if I sent in a resume that documents my MIT MechE degree, MA PE license, 15 years of acoustical engineering experience, and basically 0 software development experience, it would take all of about 5 secs for it to wind up in the Trash folder.

Yeah, it's a nitpick, and go ahead and downvote me, it's just that I'm annoyed at the propensity for tech firms to equate "engineer" with "software dev". A software dev may be an engineer but the relationship is not reciprocal.

</comment><comment><USER5> "disrupting" will replace "ninja" in recruiting job ads for Software Engineers.

<comment><AUTHOR> wait, what about "geek pasture"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one who gets a little befuddled when people refer to software developers as 'engineers'? Not that I feel software devs are undeserving or unworthy, it just doesn't seem to fit and confuses me.

Their appropriation of the word 'engineers', as if the type of engineer they are looking for was the only kind of engineer, also kind of offends me.

<comment><USER7> Seems perfectly normal to me.

Is your argument that the only people who are allowed to be called "engineers" those who have a degree with the word "engineering" in the title?

Via Wikipedia:

"An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to design and develop solutions for technological systems problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, safety and cost. The word engineer is derived from the Latin root ingenium, meaning "cleverness"."

<comment><USER6> No, my argument is twofold:

1) Fallaciously or not, I typically associate engineers with the physical world. As I am familiar with them, engineers typically design tangible things.

2) I commonly hear of math and cs degrees being considered very closely related, and math is not engineering. It is vital to engineering, and I have mad respect for mathematicians, but a mathematician is not an engineer, hence why he is called a mathematician.

2.5) do cs majors really apply science? I thought it was almost entirely math and logic.

<comment><USER8> > do cs majors really apply science? I thought it was almost entirely math and > logic.

Yes, they apply computer science. Unless science needs to have flasks and microscopes involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Front End / Web Software Engineer"

I'm having a bit of a time wrapping my head around this particular job title, is the ideal applicant a front-end developer or a web software engineer? The description is heavily in favor of the latter, and makes a passing reference to abilities in creating user interfaces.

While on the one hand, I understand the financial merits of wanting a staff member to maximize their contributions by wanting a front-end developer who can also double as a back-end developer, but at the very least shouldn't the job requirements be just as balanced? Or just go ahead and hire a person to focus on user interface and ensuring the integrity of effective user engagement, and having someone "build libraries"?

Maybe I missed the memo why this is such a popular trend.

<comment><USER7> "Front-end Developer" or "FE Engineer" are pretty standard titles these days. It essentially means you deal with the whole web stack (from Apache on up to CSS/JS) on servers that talk to a backend API. Your code typically won't deal with accessing databases directly or creating APIs.

Don't think of FE vs BE as HTML/CSS/JS vs server-side code. It is API client vs API server code. Architecturally, these stacks tend to be completely separate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> OT, but could there be anything more irritating than a giant "Feedback" button that hovers over the text you're trying to read?

How about if you clicked on it to give feedback about the feedback button and discovered that it didn't actually do anything except hide the embedded videos? OK, you win, I guess that would be even more irritating.

(Same behaviour in Safari 5.0.1 and Firefox 3.5.5 on the Mac, if anyone is interested.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks that is helpful feedback - definitely don't like annoying widgets and just stopped noticing it after awhile. I just took that out - it was supposed to be linking to our GetSat forums but was broken, as you said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Two things on the Jobs page (Chrome 5.0.375.125 on OS X):

1\. If you click the "Next Geek" button in quick succession, the geeks start queueing up vertically while the current one fades out.

2\. The "Our DNA" box near the bottom isn't lined up with the one above it.

Neither of those would stop me from applying if I were in the market for a job right now, I've heard nothing but good things about Twilio.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! repro'd and ticket filed for each

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> But what if I don't like walnuts and don't want to lose my thumbs?

(I'm really curious if anyone is going to catch that reference)

<comment><USER13> <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0559769/quotes></comment></comment>


P.R.I.D.E. - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10ifupdl5J8Tg-5LIST42YGNDQ7gjmkJxws7RdxiXjb4/edit?usp=sharing

<comment><AUTHOR> The only thing I did to this sheet is type in the letters as you see them. Google Easter Egg!</comment>